The Room Above Pooja's
by blacktop
Summary: A new place gives Reese room to heal and grow


**The Room Above Pooja's**

Reese found his third apartment entirely by happy accident.

He wasn't consciously looking for another place, but when he stumbled across it, the perfection of the set up struck an unexpected chord in him. He wanted a normal life and he wanted to live it there.

Finch had sent him out one evening tracking a number with a serious gambling problem. The sucker was in over his head for thousands, but couldn't stay away from the black jack tables in the underground gambling establishments that littered Manhattan and the Bronx. According to Finch's intel, their guy was targeted by some persnickety gangsters who thought the elimination of a relatively minor debtor would serve as an instructional example to the bigger fish they wanted to fry.

Rather than tackle the entire goon squad lining the walls of the warehouse casino where his quarry was losing yet another round, Reese decided to disrupt the proceedings the old fashioned way. He pulled on his leather jacket, settled a driving cap over his eyes, cocked a sub-machine gun at his hip, and barged in through the front door, shouting orders in Spanish.

He strode directly to the table where the hapless number was cowering, grabbed the kid by the collar and dragged him to the exit. In an inventive aria of Spanglish, Reese informed the astonished crowd that this small-testicled example of the devil's work would pay with his life for having fucked the boss's wife. She, the heartless bitch, was already floating in the East River, and this misbegotten pile of shit would soon follow her to spend eternity contemplating his errors.

As usual when Reese asserted himself, the crowd parted.

The man hung like a limp rag from Reese's arm until he was stuffed into the backseat of the car and they were able to speed away. After five minutes of silence, Reese took pity on the shivering man and barked a laugh.

"Really had you going, didn't I, kid?"

"What is this? Who are you?"

"Right now, I am your best friend, the one you will name your first born son after, the one you will marry your sister to."

"You're not going to kill me? "

"No, and nobody else will either, after tonight."

Snuffling from the back seat greeted this blanket assurance.

"Unless you dive back into the black jack. You are no good at it, in case you haven't figured that out yet, and next time I won't be around to save your ass."

Gun work for the sixth straight evening was making Reese cranky and hungry. He turned around to get a closer look at his number while the car idled at a red light.

Large dark eyes, black hair flopping to the bridge of his nose, mahogany skin peeking through the open collar of his plaid shirt.

"Christ, kid, how old are you anyway? Does your mother know you are out after curfew?

He meant that last as a joke, but the kid took the threat seriously.

"You can't say anything to her, she really _will_ kill me." Maybe nineteen or twenty years old max.

"Tell me where you live. We will work out something to say when we get there."

Reese drove to the address the kid, Kiran Soni, gave him and pulled around to the back of a row of modest stores on a commercial street that Reese judged had seen better days before the recession.

Kiran led Reese through a sizeable stainless steel clad kitchen, toward a tiny office barred only by a curtain of red beads. There, a short woman in a blue and green sari sat at a desk punching numbers into a calculator larger than her head. Her face, swollen perhaps with years and cares, was unlined and her luminous eyes were the exact model for her son's.

The story Reese and Kiran told Mrs. Soni made considerable sense, unless it was examined too closely. Fortunately, she was in a mood to forgive her son for meeting his friends at a disco and to thank the brave and handsome man who had saved him from the fire that destroyed that disreputable place.

Hugs, glasses of milk, offers to reheat the restaurant's leftovers warmed Reese even before he had a chance to consume his first full meal in six days. Rather than using a table in the front room of the restaurant, Mrs. Soni insisted that Reese bring his overloaded plate up one flight of stairs to her parlor. She turned off the television which had been entertaining no one in the darkened room and made him sit at a table next to her arm chair.

Flowers were everywhere. The chair Mrs. Soni occupied was covered in pale yellow fabric patterned with pink flowers. The pink flowers invaded the curtains and spilled onto the rug where they mixed with blues, purples, and an orange shade never seen in nature. Sobering the floral riot was an array of framed black and white photos marching across the longest wall of the parlor. Most of the photos were of men in uniforms, white, khaki, gray lined up in imposing rows, their shiny hair and brilliant smiles glowing down the years.

Reese didn't talk much during that first midnight meal above Pooja's Restaurant. He didn't need to because Mrs. Soni had so much to tell him.

She spoke about her three oldest sons, Anand, Anil, and Vinay, who ran the restaurant, dividing the work into neat fiefdoms of kitchen, wait staff, and finances. Two were married, she approved of these women who were both modest and fertile, and the third was engaged to a fine girl who was studying to be a pharmacist. Her two youngest sons, Kiran and the baby Satish, were both students in engineering at Rutgers.

Mrs. Soni's husband had left her the restaurant when he died and it provided a good but not robust living. She hoped one day to be able to upgrade the upholstery on the red booths which lined the restaurant walls, but there wasn't quite enough money at present. But she never lacked for customers. When people got tired of the dry sandwiches in the coffee shop across the street, everybody came over to sample the vegetarian fare at Pooja's. And if they stopped in once, they always returned.

Reese left Pooja's after two in the morning, his stomach full and his head swimming with flowers. He slept soundly until the next evening, when he rose, showered, and went back to bed.

Three apartments seemed like a lot, but the abundance kept suspicious prying to a minimal, Reese found.

His first place was truly a fleabag, a retreat for the hookers and dealers who favored convenience and anonymity over luxury. The mattress was thin; the walls were gray, paper over lathe only. But Reese figured it was better to be able to monitor who was on either side of his room by the groans, sobs, sighs, and grunts they generated than to grow paranoid at the silence of more proper neighbors.

This was where he kept his whiskey, his knife collection, and his magazines. When it became necessary, he let Fusco trail him to this hotel because he knew it would satisfy the cop's curiosity and support his jaded view of Reese. Cold-eyed killers always lived in roach infested, hot-sheet hotels like this.

After the shooting, Finch had insisted on renting a flat in a fussy Upper East Side building so that Reese could recuperate in style. As if the gunshot wounds would heal faster in a high rent district. It was easier to go along with that idea than dispute it at the time. So when it became necessary to leave there, Reese again agreed to be set up in another fancy apartment, this time a smaller one in a door-man building on Beekman Place.

He could see the river from the 14th floor corner windows of the living room. The real estate agent called the view "breathtaking," but the lack of curtains was frightening. So Reese mostly stayed in the sleek bedrooms and the Euro-style kitchen, out of sight. Finch hired a maid service to change the sheets and clean the place. And to report back that Reese usually slept at Beekman Place twice a week or less.

The room above Pooja's was for him.

Mrs. Soni was a kind but firm negotiator. When Reese came back three weeks after their initial meeting to ask about renting a room from her, the grin split her round face. But it took them four hard fought sessions over seven days to work out the details of their arrangement. Reese could take the third floor room at the top of the stairs, immediately above Mrs. Soni's parlor. This room was large and square with windows that looked out over the front of the restaurant. He could easily monitor the street without shifting the curtains.

Reese asked that she remove the area rug which covered most of the floor. Mrs. Soni looked hurt, as if this was a cherished family heirloom she had saved just for him. But when he said he was allergic to the dust it would collect, she relented and ordered a waiter to roll up the offending rug and stand it in a corner of the room behind a carved wooden screen.

Reese wanted the floors bare so that any unauthorized movements could be heard and intruders neutralized quickly. He would have preferred that Mrs. Soni remove the carpet on the staircase too, but he didn't think she would give into that request at the outset.

Two meals a day were part of the package deal. Reese figured he would never eat more than once a day, but he didn't want to worry Mrs. Soni from the start by declaring how irregular his tenancy would be.

No visitors, no alcohol, no smoking, no women, no outside food. He could bring in a TV if he wanted. He didn't.

Sheets would be changed every Thursday morning. She offered to do his personal laundry for an extra charge. He balked, on principle really; this was a negotiation after all. So Mrs. Soni agreed that the laundry service would be covered by his rent. He found out later that she had a deal with Mr. Lee on the corner who laundered all the restaurant's linens for a fixed price. Reese's shirts and underwear were washed at Lee's as a favor for a valued customer.

The time in the room above Pooja's stretched into months, the longest period Reese had stayed at one address in years.

He kept most, but not all of his clothing there. A few items - a shirt, shaving equipment, shoes - remained in the other two residences and he slept in them from time to time in an irregular roundelay that would have unsettled a normal man.

Pooja's was where Reese kept all his suits, a rank of spotless black uniforms, hanging from a rolling clothing rack next to the rug behind the wooden screen. He left the freshly laundered shirts in Mr. Lee's brown paper wrapping on the round table next to his bed, taking one out as he used it until the package was flat. He marked the passing of time at Pooja's by the steady dwindling of his stack of shirts. He saved the rough twine each week.

The colors of the tiny bathroom were not ones he would have chosen, but the deep green tile trimmed out with gold fixtures fit the place and came to fit his mood too. The red and yellow towels reflected the embracing decor of the restaurant downstairs and buoyed his spirits when he shaved.

After the first week in his room, Reese had reopened negotiations with Mrs. Soni. He could not sleep under the loud pink and green patterned bed spread she provided; to his eyes it clashed harshly with the mustard walls and the brighter yellow of the paisley dotted curtains. Mrs. Soni listened, but was unmoved.

After two days of silent glowering, Reese won a reprieve. Mrs. Soni agreed to change the bed spread, which really was too heavy in weight for the summer she said, to a lighter covering which was more suitable for the season. Reese decided he could not press that particular battle any further when she unfurled the replacement, an orange coverlet with a swirling parade of pale blue and purple amoebas.

That night before he went to sleep under the garish orange coverlet, Reese removed all the paintings of anonymous celebrities and goddesses from the walls and stacked them under the bed. Since the next day was Thursday, sheet changing day, Reese was sure Mrs. Soni would note the discarded paintings and he waited with some anxiety for her reprisal. Which never came. If she did have an opinion about these changes, she never said anything to him.

He made other modifications to the room which he hoped Mrs. Soni did not know about.

One night when he knew she was in the kitchen office, Reese pried up a floor board under the upholstered chair standing at the window. Inside the cache he made there, Reese placed two passports, four credit cards in names to match the passports, and a roll of cash in several currencies secured in a piece of Mr. Lee's twine. He debated leaving a gun there, but decided against it for fear that one of the grandchildren might find it somehow.

On another evening, Reese carefully pried the medicine cabinet away from the bathroom wall. This niche was a better place for the gun and the supply of morphine he kept in case the pain overwhelmed him. He chipped the gold frame around the mirror as he replaced it on the wall.

Reese quickly learned the names of Mrs. Soni's grandchildren who came over to visit her at the restaurant most afternoons. Children made the best sentinels because they were naturally curious and observant. He taught these assets to look out for certain types of movements in the foot traffic in front of the restaurant and certain kinds of behaviors in the customers who ate there. Avani and Bijal, the older girls, faithfully made reports to Reese every evening he stayed at Pooja's. The younger children, Leena and Hari, listened carefully to their older sisters during these reports, but remained silent in the presence of the tall man with icy eyes who almost never smiled.

When basketball season came in the winter, Reese took up Mrs. Soni's invitation to watch the Knicks games on her television from time to time. After finishing dinner in his own room, he joined the family in Mrs. Soni's parlor.

Watching the game was all he could manage, as the three sons, three wives (the middle son had married his pharmacist in September), and Mrs. Soni kept up a constant chatter which drowned out the narration of the game itself. Her loyalty to the Knicks was shallowly rooted in a flirtation begun during the Jeremy Lin craze of the previous season. She was not quite sure of the rules of the game however, and would ask Reese for guidance during any lull in the family conversation.

Despite the ruckus, Reese found it hard to stay awake during these viewing sessions. On more than one occasion, he fell asleep on the couch in the middle of the game, surrounded by the boisterous din. Always, when he awoke alone in the dark, he found a blanket covering his body from ankle to shoulder. He folded the blanket with care, laid it on the sofa, and slowly made his way upstairs to his room in his bare feet.

Reese was not certain what Mrs. Soni thought he did for a living. She never asked him and he never bothered to make up a story for her comfort. He was sure she noted the irregularity of his arrivals and departures, the nights he did not return home, the cuts that appeared on his brow and the bruises that regularly decorated his chin.

She never said a word about any of this. But he noted that she replenished his first aid kit with new bandages, antiseptic, and aspirin as he needed it. He never found her in his bathroom and the kit was always in the same location on the floor under the sink, but he knew she saw to its care and upkeep as a part of her daily routine.

One evening, when Reese stopped at her office door on his way up to his room, Mrs. Soni grasped his forearm and led him forcefully up the stairs. She guided him through the parlor to her bedroom and indicated to him to help her push the bed.

Without a sound they moved the bed away from the wall, creating a space behind the headboard. Mrs. Soni lifted the pink dappled curtain from the wall and silently pointed at a door which was hidden behind the drape.

Reese opened the door and looked through it to a dusty room that smelled of grease and dye. As his sight adjusted to the dim light he could see a second door at the far end of this enclosure. He looked back at Mrs. Soni, asking a question with his eyes.

"That door leads out to the street. If you ever need to use it, John, just wake me up and I will help you move the bed."

Finch's phone calls continued to pull Reese away from Pooja's several days a week. Sometimes, after a particularly tough case, Reese refused to rest in the flop house or the fancy flat, even if he was near to their locations.

Instead, he made his way to Pooja's, entering through the kitchen in the back, dragging up the stairs past Mrs. Soni's parlor where the television chattered merrily in the dark. Without removing his clothes, he lay down across the disputed bed spread, staring at the patterns cast upon the floor by the gentle movements of the curtains until sleep came at last.


End file.
